Singing Amy Winehouse in Tehran

THE NEW YORKER

BY ROBIN WRIGHT

For decades, both before and after his 1979 revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini railed against “Westoxication”—the poisoning of Iran’s Islamic society by Western culture. The new theocracy banned everything from music and dancing to modern art. Tehran’s National Museum of Contemporary Art crated away Picassos, Pollocks, Warhols, and Mirós worth billions. Even chess, a game with local roots, was banned. In the early nineteen-eighties, I watched a customs official tear up an entire deck of playing cards, one at a time.

Link to the article